Apple's new iApp Pages makes beautiful documents. I like the feature set a lot, too. But there's one bewildering setting that took me forever to figure out: multiple language support. If you have your OS set in one language (like English), and want to write in another language (like French or Spanish), Pages refuses to change the language of the file to anything other than the language setting of the OS itself. So you get the red squiggly lines everywhere. I did find a way to set the language for the currently selected text, but no way to apply the change document-wide without doing a Select All, and no way to set the language to be another one permanently.

To set the language for the currently selected text, bring up the Formatting palette. Under Text > More: Language, you can set the language. To set the language document-wide, first do a Select All, and then change the language. It took me a while to figure out that Pages can have multiple language types in a single document. This is why when you change it in one place, clicking into a different block of text reverts back to the default language.

I filled a bug report with Apple, but apparently this is the "intended functionality". Not very intuitive, but it makes sense if you want to write in multiple languages in the same document.

I haven't played much with Pages, but what I have understood is that languages can be a property of styles. Hence you can have a style called "body Swedish" and another one called "body English" and then select among them when writing multi-lingual texts.

Having set the styles properly. The writing of multilingual documents becomes much less of a hazzle.

Most text editor (and layout programs) allow you to use the language like a style attribute. In contrast, the spellchecker in OS X, although working globally in all (Cocoa) apps, which is a nice feature, so far you could only set the language globally but independently from the system language.

It seems like Pages (and maybe Keynote 2) offer more customisation in that sense (but take their default from the system language and not from the language set for the global spellchecker).

My favourite feature of the OS X spellchecker however is the 'Multilingual' setting. It allows you to write in something like ten different languages and only if a word does not exist in any of them it gets marked (without constantly having to change the language setting). This catches basically all typos (though a couple of False Friends will be overlooked).

1. Create a new blank document
2. Press Apple+A to select all
3. Set the language in the Inspector > Text > More > Language to Nederlands (Dutch)
4. Save the document as a template (File > Save as Template) in My templates as "Dutch Blank"

Now I just select this template if I want to make a Dutch document. Of course you can replace Dutch with your own language :)

1. Open a new blank document.
2. Press Cmd+A to do a Select All
3. Open Inspector (Alt+Cmd+I) and under the Text tab click on More
4. Change the language to your preferred one.
5. Do the same to the headers if you want to...
6. Go to File, save as template and save it as: "Blank.template" (template is the file's extension) to your Desktop.
7. Go to the iWork folder where the Pages app is, and right-click (or ctrl-click) Pages, and select Show Package Contents, then go to Contents--> Resources--> Templates--> Blank and copy-paste your edited Desktop file to this folder (replace it).
8. DONE! Now when you open a new blank document, your language has been set!